Auschwitz-Birkenau
became the killing centre where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed.
After an experimental gassing there in September 1941 of 850 malnourished and
ill prisoners, mass murder became a daily routine. By mid 1942, mass gassing of
Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz, where extermination was conducted on an
industrial scale with some estimates running as high as three million persons
eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning
...

9
out of 10 were Jews. In addition, Gypsies, Soviet POWs, and prisoners of all
nationalities died in the gas chambers. Between May 14 and July 8,1944, 437,402
Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 48 trains. This was probably the
largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust.

Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Nazi Germany's largest concentration and extermination camp facility, was
located nearby the provincial Polish town of Oshwiecim in Galacia, and was
established by order of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler
on 27 April 1940. Private diaries of Goebbels and Himmler unearthed from the
secret Soviet archives show that Adolf
Hitler personally ordered the mass extermination of the Jews during a
meeting of Nazi German regional governors in the chancellery. As Goebbels wrote "With
regards to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer decided to make a clean sweep
..."